Not Bad At All
by Toph4ever
Summary: A Story i worte for an english assignment, this is just a start, please tell me if you want more!  IHad to warp some personalities and backgrounds to work it, but i think it's ok.


**Alright Disclaimer: While the story is indeed mine the characters are property of the anime Toradora, which I took them from as I felt they would fit this story well, and I needed an excuse to set this in Japan and also needed some really great characters I already knew to make this work. Since the personalities/characters of Ryuji and Taiga fit so well I used them, and slightly warped the personalities of Yasuko and Ami to fit my purposes, but the situations and background remain similar, this could be considered an ad-on to the series, an insert, or a fan fiction in all sense of the word. This is an assignment I did for my short story unit in English, if you find any errors, please tell me, and tell me how you like it, but please be kind if it sucks, this is more or less my first fan fiction, I also have a re-written Romeo and Juliet play I could post, so tell me if you think I should put that one up too**

**-Super_Fly_Panda-**

**Chapter One: Not So Bad At All **

"Taiga," I reminisced, she'd only been with us for a few weeks now. Not all that long when I think about it, but I had come to love every second of the time she spends over at our, 'recently shaded,' apartment. Shaded, that's one thing it never used to be. We had a beautiful view of the haphazardly organized little town we overlooked from the hilltop upon which our apartment sat. Had, referring to the newly built and disgustingly lavish condo complex that now towered over the west side of our building. "The side that also happens to contain my room," I contemplated quite unhappily, which, along with the kitchen were my two favorite rooms in our home. "And now it's just the kitchen," I silently mused, "I can't really appreciate the view of that brick wall as much as I used to the one of the countryside."

Our apartment its self was modest, able to comfortably hold a family of three, which it had for about five years after my birth, until my father had died in a police related shooting, leaving a young boy and a widow to fend off the world alone. As you can imagine, the means of my father's death did not endear the police force to me in any way, in fact it made my already bad situation worse. To cover up their mistake, the law released a report stating that my father had been involved in drug trafficking and the Mafia, which justified his death as a wanted criminal. The side of that lie they never saw was the one affecting me every day of my life. As the son of an alleged, 'Don,' of the Japanese underworld, those who didn't know me labeled me the community delinquent at the best of times, and even those who had in fact known me my entire life became uneasy and distant around me. This was a misunderstanding I often tried, and failed to correct.

"Ryuji!"

I whipped my head around, just in time to see Taiga bolting down the street towards me with a wooden sword in tow.

"Baka! You were supposed to be home exactly twenty three minutes ago to make supper! Where were you? I'm starving!" She shouted as tackled me lumber blade first to the ground. We each wrestled for a good footing with which to pin the other down. I knew what was coming if I didn't win, and as such fought like a daemon to gain the upper hand, but my opponent was trained in the martial art of judo, and, being the ground fighting pro she was, had me pinned and thoroughly thrashed before I could shout a response. "You stupid dog, when will you learn to be on time?"

"As soon as you cease your incessant beating with that infernal blade," I replied as sarcastically as I could.

"Oh my, big words for such a small mind Sir. Ryuji, I'm impressed," she grinned.

I retaliated with a shout of, "Have at the knave!" and with that picked up a branch, which, by its look, had broken off of a nearby tree by the recent monsoons, and mock fenced her the most of the remaining route home. When we finally collapsed on the grass from exhaustion I asked, "Taiga, tell me again why you ran away from home."

Of course I already knew the story. Her father, having divorced her mother when she was very young, took her around the world with him on business trips, yet he was always working, and as such, Taiga never saw much him. Naturally this widened the already present gap between them that the divorce had created until it was at a point when even a single, tiny blow could shake them apart. That blow however was not small in any sense, and it came in the form of her father arriving home one day from work with an engagement ring on his finger. Taiga had inquired, and to her horror had verified that he was engaged to another woman, who he proceeded to bring home to meet her the next day, and Taiga developed an immediate hate of her. Heartbroken that her mother would be so easily replaced, she asked her father if she could move out on her own. To her infinite surprise he agreed, and she ended up here. In my town, in the disgustingly fancy apartment building that now blocked my previously beautiful view, in the apartment whose balcony ended only a few feet from mine. My neighbor.

She recounted more or less this same story to me, though her descriptions of her father and choice of words were much more colorful than mine. Feeling refreshed we got up and walked the remainder of the distance home in a comfortable silence, up the hill and past Taiga's building, and mounted the tall staircase to my second floor apartment where we both spent most of our time.

Taiga technically lived next door, but that was only true when it came to sleeping, every other hour was spent either at school, in the desk two rows across and one column up from me, or at my home playing her absurd video games and waiting for me to make dinner. School is actually where we met through a chance encounter, which was more or less knocking each other over in the hallway by mistake, and discovered we were neighbors. We eventually forged a friendship based on ease and necessity which evolved over time into a bond to rival that of Siegfried and Roy, minus the homosexuality and lion taming. I had most certainly felt this connection with Taiga on the way home from school laughing and joking, but as we mounted the last few steps leading to the doorway I felt something change. The apartment no longer looked like my welcoming home, but instead like an abandoned shack, decaying, decrepit. I could tell Taiga could sense this as well, there was something quite plainly off about the building. It wasn't different in any way, at least, not physically. It was almost as if the place's atmosphere had changed from the usual light, comfortable hominess to something almost palpable, to the point where the air around us became more difficult to breathe with every additional step we took. I cracked the door and found the source of this impossible tension sitting in the entryway, head in her hands. My mother, Yasuko, whose name I had as a small child shortened to Ya-Chan, which was kind of a nickname with an honorific at the end, it had felt right, so I stuck with it. Come to think of it, when I was still that age everything had always seemed right, no matter what the situation there had always been a bright side, always a silver lining, but as she raised her head to me, the look in her eye instantly destroyed any illusions I may have had of things turning out alright this time. In fact, it gave me the distinct feeling that nothing would ever be alright again.

I now saw that the hand that she had not been holding onto her forehead with contained a baggie of small, green, bulbs, they were no bigger than peas, and looked like they were made of tightly rolled up leaves. The motion of her raising her head was enough to send a waft of skunky odor my way. I knew the smell from some of the back alleys in town I frequented for routes to my high school which often proved far quicker than dodging pedestrians and traffic on weekday mornings. Pot, a drug which bestowed its lucky owner with enough labels and baggage to fill a Hollywood star's mansion in any town, especially the smaller ones. I most certainly lived in one of those small towns, but my situation was different from most peoples', it wasn't the populace that made it that way, nor the local crime rate, or even what the neighbors would think that made the appearance of this little baggie a problem for me. I didn't have it that easy. My issues lay in two other factors, the country, because in Japan, the laws very strictly stated that possession of illegal narcotics of any kind was a very serious offense, and the corrupt force that carried out those laws. The police here didn't care if it was medical, illegal, or a stage prop, if you were seen with anything the law could deem even remotely hazardous, they'd lock you up and throw away the key until someone could fatten their wallets enough to persuade them to dig through the trash and find it.

The slap I received from Ya-Chan following my entrance into the apartment confirmed that she knew this as well as I did, and even as I was reeling from her blow, she screamed, "How could you do this to me Ryuji! What on earth possessed you to bring something like this into our home! You know what the police will do if they ever get wind of something like this! Ever since your father died they've been trying to get us on something or other, some technicality, just to keep us quiet about…"

I knew what she wanted to say, 'To keep us quiet about the cover up,' since we were the only ones who would know that it was bull. But I also knew why she hesitated to say it. We had yet to tell Taiga the story that explained the reason we were a two person family, and Ya-Chan was obviously hesitant about letting slip something that could be used against us. She hadn't trusted Taiga to not tell the police we were talking about it, and instructed me to keep it on the down low, as what they called, 'Conspiring against the government,' also known as the freedoms of speech, thought, and expression in the rest of the world, was considered to be an even worse crime than possession of illegal paraphernalia, and would get us silenced permanently. This fairly morbid thought was followed closely by a screaming Taiga bursting through the door to my aid.

"Ryuji what's all the yelling in here about, are we being attacked! And me without any real weapons. Stupid wooden sword, I should really start carrying someth…" She stopped in midsentence when she saw my mother, wild eyed and furious, frozen in the follow through position for a smack, glaring at her.

"You!" Ya-Chan roared, "You did this, manipulated my boy, made him bring this into MY house! My life is ruined! If only I just had the neighbors and my kid's reputation to worry about!"

"Mom."

"Now the Police are going to be knocking down our door, and we're all gonna get taken away! No parole, no bail! No hope of ever getting out!"

"Mom!"

"I'm going to rot in jail now, at the age of thirty seven, for no reason other than because I let YOU into MY house, you evil ungrateful girl! I ought to throw you out on the street right now! Both of you!"

"MOM! If you'd just shut up for twelve seconds I'll list five good reasons that explain why you're absolutely wrong and overreacting. 1: Have Taiga or I have ever come home smelling even remotely of any kind of smoke, much less pot smoke? No. 2: Have you ever seen us acting even slightly high or unusual? My guess is no. 3: you're freaking out about the police for no reason; they won't know anything about this, or come busting down our door unless you tell them, because I know Taiga and I sure as hell aren't going to. 4: From that empty bottle of scotch," I gestured to a 26 oz bottle lying drained and overturned on the floor beside her, "I would guess you've been drinking again, which automatically makes you highly irrational and unfit to judge us in any way. And finally 5: I'm willing to bet this is probably another one of Ami's hopeless ploys to get Taiga and me together. I Honestly don't know why she bothers, but this sort of thing is right up her alley, it's most likely some kind of ridiculous, elaborate scheme to force us to date." As absurd as it sounded I actually believed it to be fairly close to the truth. Ami Kawashima was a student in class, who had recently transferred here from here old school due to an incident with a stalker at the modeling job she had in whatever major city she previously lived in. She was always coming up with new schemes to get me to date Taiga, last week it had been some kind of plot involving several hairdressers, a carnival complete with petting zoo, a troupe of exotic dancers, and a large monkey named Bubba. This however had failed when Bubba had taken a liking to one of the dancers and proceeded to chase her around the carnival and surrounding area, resulting in hundreds of dollars in property damages, a broken arm, and a very heartbroken chimp. I would most certainly not have put a baggie O' weed past her, no matter how vague its role in her grand scheme may have been.

"I DON'T CARE!" Came the extremely agitated response from my mother. "I don't care if this friend of yours, you two, or even Santa Claus brought it in here, I want you two gone! Now!"

"What!" Taiga and I both shouted in surprised unison.

"Gone, out, no longer living under this roof! I don't know where you'll go, and I really don't care, I won't stand for this in my home! You have one hour to pack and I expect you to have departed. And Ryuji, you may consider yourself officially disowned, and no longer a part of my family."

The entire room suddenly went dark as I heard those words, I collapsed to my knees and heard the slamming of a door somewhere in the house. I imagine that it was to Ya-Chan's bedroom, and that it must have been very loud judging by the way Taiga jumped behind me, but I didn't even flinch, I was so shell shocked that it sounded soft, dull, like someone lobbing a heavy book onto a bed, . It was all I could do to simply drag myself across the floor to my room, and begin packing my things. I was so surprised I just kind of accepted what had happened, and as such it didn't even occur to me that being inconsolably distraught was the correct response in the face of a situation like this.

We left the apartment walked in the direction of what the few bureaucrats we had called, 'The city center,' which was basically the part of town containing our school along with many of the various industries and office buildings, until I finally broke down on a park bench along one of the many public paths that lead to it. It took a while before Taiga had me calmed down enough to actually speak, and even longer before she had me able to think about our situation with any kind of rationality, but when she finally managed it she began listing off our options.

"Alright Ryuji, as I see it we have a couple of choices here, we can A: Live at my condo."

"No!" I shouted, which earned me some odd looks from passers by, "I refuse to be anywhere NEAR that woman, let alone next door!"

"Well then there's option B: Sell the condo and get one here in town, which I must admit I like a lot better than option A, I really don't want to be next door to your mother right now either."

"Not MY mother anymore remember, I'm disowned. But yea that could work; if we sell your condo we'll definitely have enough money to get at least a two bedroom one in town. The only thing I don't like about that idea is the fact that we'd have to go back there to move out your stuff and sell the old one. I mean I could manage it, but it'd be difficult for me to be so close to her."

"Well we don't have to do it right away," Taiga explained, "That's where options C and D Come in."

"And those would be?" I asked, slightly irritable.

"C is moving away for a while, go to the city or something, transfer schools, Ami managed it." She replied.

"No, I don't think I could stand moving away right now, a new environment with no one we know would be too hard at the moment. And please don't even bring her up." I said looking away irately, "Man if I could get my hands on her right now…"

"Get your hands on who, oh by the way did you two enjoy my little gift?" I heard exclaimed from behind us. I whipped my head around to face the speaker only to come face to face with an absurdly bright yellow hat. I didn't recognize the owner I until I noticed the waist length blue/black tinted tresses flowing silkily out from underneath it. However shortly after sighting the oddly dyed hair, it stopped looking blue to me; my world became colored entirely in shades of red.

"AMI!" I screamed, lunging at her in a state of sheer fury, overturning the bench I had previously been sitting on and Taiga with it. Ami sidestepped, leaving me in a downward plunge which resulted in my receiving a mouthful of turf, however I quickly recovered from this and pounced, landing on her midsection.

"Ouch Ryuji, what the hell, get off me!" She screamed as she struggled to free herself from under me.

"Why did you do it Ami! WHY!" I screamed, staring at her crazily.

"Do what?"

"The weed, Ami!" I noted the look on her face as I shouted this, and grinned in triumph, "It was you wasn't it! You planted it in my house! Baka!"

"What's the big deal, it's just weed, it's not like it's cocaine!" She shouted back, "I got it from some crazy fan at my modeling gig in America last week, I don't smoke the stuff myself, so I figured I'd give it to you and Taiga to help you chill out. Jeez, I knew you guys needed it, but I never imagined it would be this badly, I mean attacking me in public? You drug crazed psycho you."

I was practically in tears at this point. "That's all this was? You can't even justify it as another crazy scheme to get Taiga and me together? What is this to you, some kind of joke?"

"Yea actually," She replied, "Why, did Yasuko freak out about it?"

"Yes Ami, she freaked out. She freaked out, and then she kicked both of us out of the house," I said gesturing to Taiga and myself, "And then she disowned me. Thanks for the joke, it was really freaking hilarious."

Ami's hand flew to her mouth, "Oh my god!" She exclaimed, her voice muffled by her fingers, "I had no idea! I mean I didn't think…"

"No." I breathed sullenly, "You didn't think, and now I'm parentless, and quite possibly homeless." Taiga had gotten to her feet by this point and was simply staring at us, watching the scene unfold.

"You two stay right here!" Ami exclaimed, "I'll go straight to Yasuko and sort this out!" She jumped up to leave, knocking me off of her, but before she had a chance to run I caught her wrist.

"Don't bother." I said softly, "Once Ya-Chan gets something in her head it's impossible to get her to relent. Trust me, every time she grounded me as a kid I tried. It never worked."

Well, if that's how you feel…" She said absently, "At least let me put you up at my place, you can stay as long as you want."

"Haven't you done enough…"

"That was option D," Taiga exclaimed, cut me off, "Before we were so rudely interrupted I was going to say that option D would be to hole up at a friend's for a while, until we can figure out what to do with the condo and get our own place in town."

Upon hearing this Ami's brain switched gears immediately, "WHAT! You two were planning on living together! Romantic! So tell me," She exclaimed, throwing her arm around Taiga's shoulders, "Were you planning on getting a one bedroom? You were, weren't you, you little horndog." She winked, not giving Taiga a chance to defend herself, "I bet you weren't going to tell Ryuji about it either, you were probably gonna lure him in with something like, "You can sleep on the futon, I'll take the bedroom," Or maybe trick him, saying something along the lines of, "Shut up you stupid dog, this isn't a hallway, it's the second bedroom," And then when he came home the next day you'd be waiting with the lights off and..."

"AMI!" I shouted, "If you wouldn't mind could you get your tiny, impractical brain out of the gutter and show us where we'll be staying, and how you'll be fixing the mess you've made?" After saying this I turned around to the sound of angry mutterings to witness a very indignant and red faced Taiga murmuring nonsensically and looking like she was on the verge of exploding.

"You, you, you…" She mumbled, hands clenched into fists, and thrust down at her sides.

"You know it's true Taiga, don't even try do deny it," Ami winked to her as she began to prance away in the direction of her home. "You were thinking of doing exactly that just now weren't you?"

"AMI!" Taiga screamed comically, throwing her head back. Ami just laughed and began to sprint; anticipating Taiga's next move, which we all knew would be something along the lines of chasing down and eventually beating the poor girl into a near coma. Taiga began her pursuit, and I followed, admittedly more slowly, I knew where Ami lived, so figured I'd get there eventually.

'Who knows,' I mused as I walked, 'A life like this might not turn out so bad, hell it might even turn out to be fun, no adults, being entirely independent, self reliant, I'll get a part time job, something involving cooking,' I smiled excitedly at the thought, 'my own kitchen too… my own future, not so bad at all.'


End file.
